Knowledge Exchange Seminar - 7 June 2017 - Deprivation in Northern Ireland

Dr Lisa Bunting, Dr Gavin Davidson and Claire McCartan (QUB) – Child Welfare Inequalities

Child welfare systems in the UK are under profound stress because of growing demand and the current squeeze of austerity; they are expensive but provide a crucial investment in our children’s future; and protecting children’s safety and development is a core function of the state. Understanding child welfare services and the role that deprivation plays will contribute to primary and secondary prevention planning. This research examines the role of deprivation in explaining differences in key children’s services outcomes between and within local authorities in four UK nations. A recent pilot study funded by the Nuffield Foundation found large differences in a child’s chance of being on a child protection plan/register or being ‘looked after’ in state care between and within local authorities strongly associated with social disadvantage creating child welfare inequalities with close parallels to those found in health and education. This new study seeks to test this hypothesis by accessing national data sets to extend the English study and replicate the investigation in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Accessing NI administrative data through the Honest Broker Service, we are examining how deprivation impacts on children’s services, and the quality and compatibility of data across the UK. 

Dr Nat O’Connor (Ulster) - Assessing the risks of economic inequality; the impact on societal wellbeing and economic development 

Economic inequality is rising in the developed world and influential research has found major risks to economic growth and population health; including OECD reports, IMF working papers, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century and the UK’s ‘Marmot Review’. Nobel economist Robert Shiller has called it “The most important problem that we are facing now today”. US President Obama has called income inequality the “defining challenge of our time”. While the USA leads on the extreme growth of income inequality, the UK and many other developed countries are moving in the same direction, and it is a global problem that transcends partisan politics. This seminar will use technical data and major research findings from a range of sources to look at how ‘economic inequality’ is defined and measured, and how inequality interacts with the wider economy, while demystifying some of the economic jargon involved. Technically, the rise of inequality is a ‘complex social problem’. The presentation uses An Inconvenient Truth as an example of the policy challenges involved in addressing a complex, multi-part, multi-cause issue such as economic inequality. The seminar will look at some policy solutions and challenges. 

Dr Stefanie Doebler (University of Liverpool) and Dr Nina Glasgow (Cornell University) - Effects of socio-economic deprivation on reported health and premature mortality in Northern Ireland – a Life-Course-Perspective

Northern Ireland’s population is ageing, following a general European trend. Maintaining the health and wellbeing of Northern Ireland’s older generation is an important task for policy makers. This is even more the case in the face of austerity and impending cuts to public spending. This talk presents new and unique findings regarding the effects of poverty and deprivation on the health and premature mortality of Northern Ireland’s ageing population. Taking a longitudinal life-course perspective, we examine multidimensional indicators of deprivation as reported in the 1991 to 2011 Northern Ireland Censuses. The analysis is based on state-of-the-art statistical modelling of panel data from the Northern Ireland Longitudinal Study (NILS), linked to 1991, 2001 and 2011 Census returns and to annual death records from 1991 to 2014 from the General Register Office. We present results regarding effects of educational, housing, material and area- level deprivation (of residential areas). This allows us to pin-point problem areas and population strata, policy should pay particular attention to.